Saturday, March 29, 2014

Usually I don't get into Twitter arguments, because they are a waste of time, but CiFWatch pointed out a conversation where I was being insulted by someone called Gary Spedding. I tried to make my position clear, but his responses and backtracking become hilarious.

It started when journalist Yair Rosenberg asked NYT reporter Jodi Rudoren if she can follow up on a post I did about how PA school Facebook pages had posters that denied Israel's right to excist:

Since I promised multiple times I'd blog anything he found that contradicted my post about social media, he could no longer claim that I wouldn't. But he knows quite well that he cannot find any such evidence himself.

I looked up about 12 schools, all girls, on FB. Most of the boys' schools did not have FB pages. Of those schools these were the only political posters I found, although one school did have a photo of the funeral of a terrorist last week calling him a martyr.

@elderofziyon Actually, people generally act like idiots on social media... Someone threatened to shoot me in the head last week. @CiFWatch

Backtracking and changing the subject again, of course. Because deep down Spedding knows I'm right and he cannot find a single social media post, not subsidized by an NGO, that would show Palestinian Arab students (or teachers, for that matter) willing to say they are willing to live side by side with Israel in a permanent peace.

Of course, when Westerners come and visit the students and teachers will tell them what they want to hear in English. But if a Fatah official visits a school talking about the right of violent resistance, will any student argue? It is laughable. Yet Spedding pretends to believe otherwise.

By the way, Spedding's accusations that I am dishonest in my posts and not being objective is the height of hypocrisy. As we were tweeting, others dug up stuff Spedding had written before on his own blog (quoted in JPost):

Hamas rockets are and should be condemned but they also need to be understood in order to progress forward with any plan for peace and justice. It does not excuse Hamas rocket fire but it explains it in an accurate way to state that the home-made rockets of hamas are a desperate attempt by angry and desperate people who join up with militant groups at taking out revenge against Israel the 4th most well equipped and armed army in the world and against israeli civilians (which is totally unacceptable and unjustifiable in terms of attacking civilians).

He also wrote, months after the Fogel family was massacred:

The J’post article sickening invokes the cloudy and unclear death of the Fogel family an attack which I have the report and pictures of in my email inbox from the day after it happened. I find it sick that the J’post is still using this attack for political gain suggesting Palestinians are to blame when there has been no further information, news or otherwise released about the murders since the IDF conveniently caught two Palestinians kept them in torture for a month until they ‘confessed’ and then announced they had caught the killers despite the evidence and speculation of it being the work of a migrant worker from asia.

That was of course an unproven rumor that was being tossed around by Israel haters and found, by the time of his writing, to have been thoroughly debunked.

But after this was exposed, Spedding removed his blog posts!

Gilead Ini, of CAMERA, takes it from there, responding to Spedding's response to my UNRWA school webpage expose:

Spedding claims that he never posted such a thing, and there is no evidence, so (he implies) Ini must be lying. And so is Sam Westrop, who also joined the conversation, and who was the one who quoted Spedding's disgusting words in the Jerusalem Post.

So is there still any evidence of this article written by Spedding on his blog on July 26, 2011 that he later deleted? Why, yes there is, thanks to the Wayback Machine and the (better than mine) search skills of @lsorang :

So we have proof Spedding purposefully expunged his post and now denies ever having written them.

Which tells you all you need to know about the intellectual honesty of Gary Spedding - who accuses me of being intellectually dishonest without giving a smidgen of proof!

Hasbys!

Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون

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